Yesterday PHP 5.2.14 has been released, together with PHP 5.3.3. I used to get excited about PHP updates, but no more. This is because of a number of disappointments I’ve talked about earlier. But that’s not really the reason of why not to get excited.

So, why shouldn’t we be excited about PHP 5.2.14? The changelog contains a lot of security enhancements and bugfixes. There is nothing wrong with this, quite the opposite. It’s good! But there’s one thing that is completely unacceptable to me and that’s the sudden announcement of the end-of-life for PHP 5.2.

This release marks the end of the active support for PHP 5.2. Following this release the PHP 5.2 series will receive no further active bug maintenance. Security fixes for PHP 5.2 might be published on a case by cases basis. All users of PHP 5.2 are encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.3.

Yes yes I know, we can all happily migrate to PHP 5.4, what’s the big deal huh? Well, how about announcing the end-of-life of a product in advance? I don’t mind it being killed of but at least let your users know in advance. I remember PHP4 being announced to get killed off, giving users a good year afterwards to prepare for the upgrade whilst receiving (possible) security updates. Yes yes I know, they said security fixes might be published on a case by case basis. Keyword here is might.

Tell me, do bigger companies and/or enterprises etc. take this? From my experience this isn’t very much appreciated. Organizations need time to plan these kind of migrations.